IT's Love-Hate Relationship With Laptops

Ian Lamont writes "Are laptops really as great as they're cracked up to be? We love their portability, and we've been charting the steady rise of laptop sales for years. Yet while many of us depend on them for work, our IT departments view them with mixed feelings. IT managers point to wi-fi configuration, complicated authentication procedures, and eight other issues as making their jobs a lot harder. What else is missing from the list of laptop limitations? What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"

More upgradeability

[SeaFox]

I know this is going to increase thickness a bit, but having upgradeable graphics cards would be nice. Same with optical drives. I know there's a couple laptops where the graphics are on a daughtercard pretty much, but until it becomes a more commonplace feature with a standard interface, there wont be an industry/market of new cards for laptops like there are for desktops.

Portable desktop

[phorm]

Most people I know (myself included) tend to use laptops as more of a "portable desktop." Perhaps if we dump the batteries we could add more cooling and - in general - get more use out of them for that purpose?

At the same time, I've seen various different models of power bricks, but I much prefer the ones that attach to the laptop snugly rather than the standard rounded barrel-connector. Perhaps something that clicks into place but isn't a pain to remove (because without batteries, it would suck to accidentally knock out that easily-disconnected power jack).

In a well-managed LAN upgrades are easy

[Nefarious Wheel]

If you use roaming profiles correctly you can upgrade an entire bureau just by walking down the aisles and swapping out the laptops. I was told a fairly major SOE upgrade was handled this way recently, in a government agency in Canberra.

Re:Clunky but cramped.

[ShieldW0lf]

I don't like them because they only have one screen. Two screens is my minimum, three plus a television is par.

When they have goggles that give me more screen space than my triple head setup and gloves that double as keyboards, I might take another look.

Re:As an IT Manager, only one signifcant problem..

[rnswebx]

This really isn't much of an issue if you don't give your users admin rights. I used to work for a company who's name represents a really long river and we weren't given admin rights on our laptops. (I was a system engineer)

At first, I hated it and even more I just hated the idea of not controlling my own machine. In the end though, it really came down to them providing me everythingI needed. If I wanted something that wasn't already installed and pertinent to me doing my job, it was almost instantly handled and installed over the intranet via what I can only guess were custom tools.

It's give and take with the portability that laptops provide. OK Joe User, you can go do your work from home, but in exchange for that we need to, among other things, take precautions that you won't be bringing in viruses to our network.

The key ingredient to my successful situation in such an environment was the capability of the supporting IT team. Without a very solid support team, I think the users would become frustrated with not being able to either install their own apps, or have the support staff provide a way to get them installed.

Food for thought at the very least.

Re:How 'bout this?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Option for no OS? Good idea. I understand VMWare is going to offer a bootable hypervisor supplied on a thumb drive this month, and also heard that Dell, IBM, and HP (I think) are going to offer a hypervisor in mobo firmware so you can boot up into a virtual environment just like our servers can now. I would really prefer that sort of arrangement to multi boot, so I can keep my debian, ubuntu, xp etc. experiences separate but simultaneously available without the underhead of an OS. Intel and AMD are offering CPUs than vector tier0 instructions off to use the hypervisor without all having to hit the BIOS at once to respond to IO interrupts, too -- this would make a laptop incredibly powerful, fast, simple, and useful.

Where do you want to go today? Gee, I don't know -- let's try this land called Ubuntu, sounds exotic. (Click.) Now that's windowing.

Re:Clunky but cramped.

[jamesh]

At least one manufacturer makes an adapter that will split a (eg) 2048x768 signal into 2 x 1024x768 separate signals to drive two monitors. That's the solution that some of our clients are using to get 3 displays. You need a bit of smarts on the O/S itself to treat the one screen as two, but once you do that it works well.

I agree with you about two screens being a minimum though. The attraction for me isn't so much the screen size, it's having two distinct workspaces. A 30" single screen probably wouldn't be as nice for the stuff I do as two 15" screens is.

Video In

[lymond01]

I'd like to be able to carry my laptop to the server room and hook up a VGA input so I can view what's on the server's screen without either purchasing a KVM or lugging in a full external monitor. Sort of like a temporary slave function (or just a F-key that allows video in...I'm not all that bothered about the keyboard and mouse).

A virtual keypad (like one of those you can lay down in front of you) plugged into your virtual eyewear (that projects the screen onto your eye) would be a nice space-saver too. Everything wireless, computer the size of an iPod in your pocket.

Re:Clunky but cramped.

[renegadesx]

Same, I know alot of "non-techies" that love them but I cant stand them, give me my full ATX tower anyday. I know people say "just use a docking station when you're at home" but then you just have a lower powered PC. The keyboard is crampy, I HATE touchpads with a passion, its just not what I'm after. Wireless is not what its all cracked up to be, there a bastard if hardware failes and there more expensive. So yeah, lol, not a fan

Re:their list

[Belial6]

"8. Laptops spawn a new breed of uber-entitled user."

This complaint is exactly why the rest of the complaints have to be seriously questioned. By that standard PCs spawn a new breed of uber-entitled user. I mean really, people expect the programs to run NOW? Having their application sit in a queue for a week to get the results just doesn't seem to fly anymore. What kind of uber-entitled user doesn't understand that there requests should sit in a queue until a time slot becomes available on the mainframe? If we allow employees to expect their job to be facilitated, the next thing you know, employees will start expecting telephones at their desks, photocopiers, pens and paper. Heck it might even get so bad that they might start expecting electric lighting or bathrooms!

Back on topic, not that we were off....

[porpnorber]

The size of a magazine, sixteen hour battery life, five second suspend/resume, and a disconnected-mode DFS that actually works. One with on-disk encryption. The laptop should not want or need an identity distinct from its home network. And, ah, yeah, a hypervisor so that my 'home' and 'work' laptops can be the same physical object without causing any issues of system or data management propriety. That's all I ask.

Re:Clunky but cramped.

[arminw]

.......Linux was the first OS I used multiple monitors on and that was about a decade ago.......

Back in 1989, I used an external 19" monitor with my SE30 Mac. It was great for doing drawings with Macdraft and later Claris CAD. The Macbook Pro is a laptop that will support two monitors.

Laptops are for on the go people. Computer costs for professionals are low enough now, so many can own a fully accessorized desktop and also a powerful laptop for travel. Laptops of necessity have to make certain compromises. Synchronization software can keep the user data up to date.